The importance of meta keywords

[languedoc]

Hello,

I am looking into Meta keywords in the attempt to understand their importance. I have been reading about this in several blogs and get the feeling that the general view is that they are no longer very valuable. Some say it is because Google and Bing no longer use them, that in terms of SEO they carry little importance and that they are a great indicator to your competitors about which keywords you believe are important...

My question is this:

Without Meta keywords, how do you deal with misspelt search keywords on your website? For example, if you were looking for a product called 'El Mundo en Espa_ñ_ol' but spelt it using the normal 'n' instead of the Spanish 'ñ', and the keyword 'Espanol' was not included in the Meta keywords, would you still find the product? English speaking people commonly search without the ñ because this is more convenient to them. So how can I make sure that the page is optimised for these type of common misspellings?

Thanks!!!

[KeriMorgret]

Tom, it might be the same way that Acrobat Reader ranks first for the query [click here] even though those those words don't appear anywhere on the page or in the source code. In my results, I see only two out of the first 10 results that have anything to do with "click here". The rest are there because of anchor text or other factors.

Think of how many web pages you see that talk about "To get Acrobat Reader, Click Here" with the Click Here hyperlinked to the download page. The search engines take that as a clue that the destination is about "Click Here". It's the same way that George Bush's bio page ranked for Miserable Failure, and how many other "Google Bombs" took place (though some are now no longer working). You might take a look at Open Site Explorer and the anchor text on the incoming links to see some off-site factors for the ranking in question.

[tomleger]

I just want to note that I just caught Google using a meta keyword to rank an article #1 for this keyword, even though the keyword ONLY appeared in the meta keywords tag.

The page was coming up for a search query like "army boots music" even though the page was only about "army boots" and the keyword "music" did not appear anywhere on the page. However, someone had mistakenly put both the meta keywords "army boots" AND "army music" on the page and this is how Google was making this determination.

So I'm perplexed as to how to interpret this, since Google says they "ignore" meta keywords for rankings. Again, this was #1 on the SERP.

[languedoc]

Thank you all for the help! Have a good week.

[malachiii]

I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion.  For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details.  Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Additionally,  your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data.  While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords

[malachiii]

I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion.  For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details.  Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Additionally,  your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data.  While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords

[flowsimple]

I still use them too, but not for the benefit of SEO, just for the sake of organization since I've been using them for years. So Amazon may have similar procedure by which they use the meta keywords for their own work habits internally.

[languedoc]

Hi Pashmina and thank you for your answer. I wanted to make sure of this before I go ahead and delete the Meta keywords from our products. Just one final comment though, I went on Amazon and saw that they are in fact still using them. If you look at the source view of the new Kindle on Amazon.co.uk this is what you see:

>From Amazon.co.uk Kindle page source view:

Why are they continuing to bother with the meta keyword tag if it has no SEO benefit?

Thanks again!

[flowsimple]

Meta keywords are not being used by search engines anymore. They have no value in search or for SEO.

The search algorithms have become sophisticated enough to deal with many variations of words such as plural or misspelt words. So let Google and Bing handle that. You don't need to worry about it so much.